Just like that, the season of haunts is upon us once more. And what better way to get into the spirit of things – to whip yourself into a frenzy of ghoulish delights – than with a spot of spooky gaming, spent safely snuggled beneath thick winter blankets as the cold autumn nights close in? Sure, you could switch on a movie or stick a pumpkin on your head, but neither’s quite the same as immersing yourself in a carefully crafted, deliciously malevolent digtial world – lights off, sound cranked up, and a sallow face watching you unseen through the window.
Which brings us to Eurogamer’s own pick for the season: 21 one of our favourite horror games; some properly scary, some just a little bit spooky, others completely different again, but all available to play on PC, PlayStation, Xbox, and Switch right now. And if you’ve got your own favourites for a Halloween thrill, please don’t hesitate to share them in the comments below.
Alan Wake 2
Platforms: PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PC.
Developer Remedy Entertainment might have spent the last few decades essentially remaking the same game in a different hat, but where hats are concerned, Alan Wake 2‘s is an especially fancy one. It marks the return of everyone’s favourite rubbish horror author Alan Wake – first seen all the way back in 2010 – but not quite as you might imagine. Remedy’s familiar third-person shooter formula this time takes on a sort of investigatory horror vibe as FBI agent Saga Anderson (who can profile suspects in her ‘mind place’) visits the sleepy Washington town of Bright Falls to solve a ritualistic murder, eventually crossing paths with old Al. The end result is a singular, pulpy mishmash of effectively moody chills and post-modern horror thrills that’s as daft as it is gorgeous. Oh, and it has a musical number to die for.
Alien: Isolation
Platforms: PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, Switch, PC.
At over a decade old, developer Creative Assembly’s Alien: Isolation might be getting on a bit, but time hasn’t dulled its power; it remains not only one of the best movie licence games ever made, but an all-time horror great too. Perfectly capturing the sleek 70s lines and grungy corridor squalor of director Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-fi horror movie classic, Alien: Isolation tells the story of engineer Amanda Ripley as she attempts to find her missing mother, Ellen, aboard the SS Sevastopol. Inevitably, it’s not long before players find themselves up against the series’ iconic Xenomorphs (plus some really quite unsettling androids) in a first-person game of unimaginably tense stealth and survival horror. Much of its success comes down to the Xenomorph’s largely unscripted and unpredictable behaviour as it mounts its relentless pursuit through air ducts and shadowy hallways, and it’s still perfectly capable of generating real heart-stopping terror even today. You’ll never look at a locker the same way again.
Costume Quest
Platforms: PS4, Xbox One, PC.
Surprisingly few video games have attempted to tackle the gleefully spooky pageantry of the Halloween holiday itself, but that might just be because developer Double Fine nailed it so perfectly when it released the adorable Costume Quest back in 2010. This lighthearted adventure in an RPG skin is the perfect evocation of the trick-or-treating spirit as its cast of kids – siblings Reynold and Wren, and their equally endearing pals – venture out into their neighbourhood one Halloween night, buckets ready to be filled. Soon enough, a monstrous plot brings calamity, whisking players on a witty, warmly nostalgic, and thoroughly endearing adventure across town, mixing genteel exploration and accessible turn-based battling inspired by the casts’ charmingly DIY costumes. It’s lovely stuff, with bags of spooky charm.
Faith: The Unholy Trinity
Platforms: Switch, PC.
Expectations: that’s what Faith: The Unholy Trinity deals in, and what it upends. Its 8-bit style – reminiscent of a BBC Micro game from the early 90s – might look harmless, safe, but to play it is to realise how much can be done within its limited bounds. You – a priest charged with performing an exorcism – might only be a tiny splatter of pixels onscreen, and the house you’re investigating a few crude same-coloured lines, but the fear of being hunted here is still felt keenly. Faith (technically a trilogy of games in one) is a disturbing experience, and its occasional first-person cut-scenes are showpiece realisations of this. A nightmarish bit of deception.
You can read more on Faith: The Unholy Trinity here
Indika
Platforms: PC.
Indika might be powered by a sense of the supernatural, but its horrors are ultimately much closer to home. It follows a scorned young nun as she embarks on a journey of self-discovery across a snowy 19th century Russia – accompanied by a voice in her head she believes to be the devil. Indika’s story, set against the bleak (and subtly surreal) backdrop of a world in turmoil, is at least in part about her reckoning with religion. The devil on her shoulder – quite literally in this instance – can be interpreted in many ways: is she cursed? Are her beliefs being tested? Is this a hallucination? Or is the devil really along for the ride? The uncertainty is part of what makes Indika so hard to put down. It’s a fascinating thing; stylishly directed in near black-and-white and prone to unexpected witty diversions as it dabbles in pixel-art minigames, ultimately making for a haunting, wonderfully written journey into a different kind of horror.
Little Nightmares 1 & 2
Platforms: PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, Switch, PC.
Sure, there’s a touch of Tim Burton and developer Playdead’s Inside in its DNA, but there’s still nothing quite like the darkly whimsical dread of Little Nightmares. Developer Tarsier’s 2017 original, which tells the story of a young girl called Six as she encounters the disturbing inhabitants of the mysterious vessel known as Maw, established the series’ winning blend of puzzles, platforming, and tense moppets-in-peril pursuit sequences. And its 2021 sequel/prequel would go on to perfect it, crafting an unforgettable world of bleak wonder and queasy, claustrophobic menace that, at times, manages to out-creep most “proper” horror games. Combined, the two titles’ dreamlike, fragmentary narratives form a satisfying – occasionally genuinely disturbing – whole, packing a surprisingly chilling punch for something so adorable. And the first game’s fantastically mean-spirited DLC is worth checking out too.
Luigi’s Mansion 3
Platforms: Switch.
If it’s family friendly frights you’re after, then Luigi’s your man. Nintendo’s deliciously spooky adventure series effortlessly blends slapstick ghost-busting thrills with lighthearted chills as the perpetually fearful Luigi visits all manner of peculiar haunts. In Luigi’s Mansion 3, that’s a towering luxury hotel, where each new floor brings an often surprising new theme and a fresh procession of ghostly guests to thwart players’ progress. It’s a relentlessly inventive adventure full of chaotic hoover-based battling and puzzling – and a wonderfully comedic hoot too if you’re after something for a slightly younger crowd of fright seekers.
Look Outside
Platforms: PC.
Francis Coulombe’s survival horror RPG oddity Look Outside isn’t exactly scary – its vibe is more menacing whimsy than outright nasty – but it’s still a brilliantly effective bit of cosmic horror. Set entirely within the confines of an apartment block, it sees players attempting to wait out a bizarre meteorological event, all while keeping their supplies stocked and their sanity in check. That involves a mix of top-down exploration and turn-based battling that plays something like Jasper Byrne’s cult survival horror hit Lone Survivor meets Toby Fox’s ode to old-school JRPGs Undertale. But it’s Look Outside’s gleefully confounding spirit and relentless, wily narrative invention that impresses most as things get increasingly weird – whether you’re meeting a painter whose doppelgangers incessantly paint themselves into existence or a resident who’s decided to remodel their apartment out of themselves. And throughout it all are faintly harrowing, morally ambiguous choices gently nudging the story in new directions. It all makes Look Outside feel fascinatingly malleable, and mischievously unpredictable. And if you like a bit of ominous 80s synth, its soundtrack is fantastic too.
Mouthwashing
Platforms: PC.
Developer Wrong Organ’s Mouthwashing is another horror game that manages to be deeply effective despite – or perhaps because of – its retro PSX-style ambience. Set aboard the stranded space freighter Tulpar, it tells a short but powerful tale of the ship’s increasingly desperate crew as they grapple with a severely injured captain, a steadily dwindling power supply, and starvation. But there’s so much more to discover – much of it far worse – lurking in the Tulpar’s decrepit corridors and the minds of characters you’ll be getting to know. For all its moments of humour and sci-fi spectacle, Mouthwashing is an often harrowing experience as it puts themes of complicity and declining mental health under a lens. Prepare yourself for some trippy, albeit agonising, psychological horror, and make sure you’ve something more jovial lined up for after the credits roll. You’ll need it.
Mundaun
Platforms: PS4, Xbox One, Switch, PC.
Developer Hidden Fields’ wonderfully idiosyncratic first-person folklore horror Mundaun is full of creeping dread, taking players to a secluded valley in The Alps where something dark is stirring. Sure there are monsters to avoid and puzzles to solve, but really the star here is its distinctive ambience. This strange, solitary journey toward the snowy peaks, and occasionally into the past, is a very lonely kind of horror, rich in ancient myth and told entirely through Romansh, the rarest spoken language in Switzerland. And its ceaselessly eerie vibe is further enhanced by a monochrome, hand-pencilled visual style as dreamy as it is disquieting.
No, I’m Not a Human
Platforms: PC.
Watching No, I’m Not a Human’s trailer, you might be expecting a quirky horror curio about identifying monsters in people-suits, which it sort of is – for a while. It all starts with a deadly heatwave – confining you to the grim squalor of your dead grandmother’s house for the entirety of the game – and a warning that murderous Visitors with human faces are infiltrating homes. Each night comes a knock at the door and another quirky character asking for sanctuary as the world outside falls into chaos. And it’s up to you to decide whether to turn them away or risk letting them in to ensure you’re not alone when the tall man with a demonic smile arrives. It’s a sort of deductive high-wire juggling act of survival, but what what really makes it work is developer Trioskaz’s impressive control of tone; early whimsy gradually gives way to questions of compassion and an oppressively bleak vision of the future as cities burn, ash-faced corpses hang from telephone poles, and children rot in the streets. Not bad for a silly game about identifying monsters in people-suits.
Resident Evil Village
Platforms: PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PC
Really, you can’t go wrong with any of Capcom’s modern-day Resident Evils, whether it’s the classic survival horror of 2019’s supremely polished Resident Evil 2 remake, or the terrifying first-person hillbilly chills of 2017’s Resident Evil 7. For this list, though, we’re going with Resident Evil Village, whose five segments are so distinct it’s almost the video game equivalent of a classic Amicus anthology movie. There is, for instance, the werewolves-on-the-loose action of its chaotic wraparound story, the Gothic castle chills of Lady Dimitrescu, the faintly Lovecraftian vibes of its fishing village section, and a truly unsettling detour into the basement of a house of dolls. It’s perfect Halloween fodder, then.
Saturnalia
Platforms: PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, Switch, PC.
Italian developer Santa Ragione has an impressive back catalogue of fascinating, artful games, and Saturnalia – its first stab at horror – is no exception. Heavily inspired by Sardinian folklore, it sees a group of four friends trying to solve the mystery of the titular town – all while being pursued by something unspeakable – in order to earn their freedom. So far, so survival horror, but Saturnalia, with its oppressive visual style, conjures a wholly unique ambience as you roam its suffocatingly labyrinthine streets. This is a game of tensely compelling exploration and investigation, in which you freely switch between characters to best exploit their distinct abilities; the town’s mysteries slowly being revealed as you put more pieces together and tease out more clues. It’s clever stuff, creating a real sense of peril when faced with the threat of the town completely reconfiguring its disorientating layout for another attempt should all four characters die. Great stuff.
Signalis
Platforms: PS4, Xbox One, PC.
Signalis, from developer rose-engine, rightly captured the heart of many a horror fan when it released back in 2022, successfully carrying the torch of survival horror classics like Silent Hill and Resident Evil while also bringing something new through fresh world building. A dark sci-fi horror set in a dystopian future might not be the first place you look for a powerful, affecting story of queer love, but that’s what Signalis weaves so beautifully into its bleak, retro-inspired vision of cosmic terror as it follows Elster, an android-like Replika, on a violent search for her partner in a nightmarish world. It manages to say a lot without too many words, and stands firm as a masterclass in tone and environmental design. It also has multiple endings that change depending on your playthrough, a rich narrative to dive into, and fantastic replay value, making it an easy recommendation, whether it’s Halloween or otherwise.
Silent Hill 2 Remake
Platforms: PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PC.
How do you even begin to build on something as exactingly crafted as the original Silent Hill 2? Every step, every rhythm, of protagonist James Sunderland’s oppressive journey through the infamously foggy town is so imbued with underlying meaning, so key to understanding the larger picture, that meddling with it too much is liable to bring the whole thing crashing down. But developer Bloober Team’s deft Silent Hill 2 remake is quite extraordinary, not only modernising the beloved survival horror classic with intelligent mechanical finessing and a beautifully forlorn makeover but expanding and enriching it in genuinely additive ways. Bloober skilfully explores new spaces within the original’s immovable structure, all while keeping masterful control of tone. And, at times, its bereft malevolence reaches some genuinely terrifying extremes (the prison!). That the studio also manages to make one of gaming’s most wrenching closing acts somehow even more devastating, speaks volumes of the quality here.
Soma
Platforms: PS4, Xbox One, PC.
Swedish studio Frictional Games has been releasing critically acclaimed horrors for over two decades now, and while anything from its back catalogue could easily make this best-of list (check out is four-strong Amnesia series if you haven’t already done so), 2015’s Soma is an absolute masterclass in cerebral horror. Trading Amnesia’s gothic terror for grungy, suffocating sci-fi, Soma unfolds several thousand years in the future, far beneath the waves. You play as Simon Jarrett, trapped in a near-deserted science facility where something has clearly gone cataclysmically wrong. But for all its viscerally grotesque moments and tense pursuit sequences, its real horror lies elsewhere. Soma’s enigmatic present-day prologue seeds a mystery that gradually blossoms into something truly unsettling as it hurtles toward its chilling, existentially horrifying conclusion.
Sorry We’re Closed
Platforms: PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, Switch, PC.
Developer À la Mode Games’ Sorry We’re Closed wears its retro inspirations freely. But while it’s clearly riffing on the language of early survival horror games – with perhaps a touch of Capcom’s cult-classic Killer7 thrown in – Sorry We’re Closed still manages to chart its own very odd path. You play as London shop worker Michelle who is cursed with a third-eye capable of peering into a world overlaid on our own after catching the attention of an arch-demon known as The Duchess. What follows is a hyper-stylish, unabashedly queer journey through a grungy alternate-dimension London – full of heartbreak and horny, dayglo demons and angels – that’s surprisingly affecting. So while you might not have had ‘hard-hitting love story’ at the top of your Halloween list, it’s highly recommended all the same.
The Evil Within
Platforms: PS4, Xbox One, PC.
Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami’s 2014 third-person survival horror The Evil Within is an odd beast, feeling part career retrospective, part tribute to the horror genre as it pinwheels from one preposterous showpiece to the next. It’s got murderous butchers in blood-stained aprons, long-haired J-horror monstrosities, opulent mansions and mad science, rustic villages with strange secrets, and fairground games that’d feel right at home in Saw. And in between all that, it tries its hand at Silent Hill-style psychological horror too, with its strange asylum interludes and head-spinning, reality warping set-pieces. It’s a game that’s hard to get a handle on, but for all its genre-hopping absurdity, it still manages to pack in exactly the kind of oppressive action and visceral thrills you’d expect from Mikami.
The Mortuary Assistant
Platforms: PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, Switch, PC
DarkStone Digital’s The Mortuary Assistant’s is such a clever idea. One: there’s the inherent creepiness (and intrigue) of working in a morgue and having to prepare cadavers for their final rest. You’ll wire their mouths shut, pin their eyelids down, and suck out their blood to replace it with formaldehyde. It’s gruesome and unsettling work. Two: layered on top is a haunting of sorts. A demon wants to possess one of the corpses in the building, but you don’t know which, so a corpse you’re working on might suddenly jolt upright or hover in the air. Or you’ll catch a glimpse of the demon itself. You’re never quite sure what’s about to happen, which multiplies the already unsettling atmosphere tenfold. Unusually for horror, The Mortuary Assistant manages to avoid becoming a game about running away or fighting. There’s no combat here, just observation, thinking, and holding your nerve – and it feels all the classier for it.
World of Horror
Platforms: PS5, PS4, Switch, PC.
Something is very, very wrong in the seaside town of Shiokawa; the Old Gods are stirring and inexplicable, horrifying incidents are on the rise as the boundaries of reality falter. That’s the starting point for developer Paweł Koźmiński’s unusual roguelike narrative adventure World of Horror. It’s a bit of a tricky thing to sum up in such a small space, but it essentially plays out as a sort of board-game-like story generator as you complete a series of randomised investigations in a bid to stave off the Eldritch apocalypse. Each vignette – ranging from sightings of long limbs slithering through the air ducts to a ramen shop that holds an unnatural grip on its patrons’ appetites – has a fixed beginning and end, but the path through is full of random events with their own branching outcomes, weird monsters to battle, and useful items to acquire. And it’s all brought to life with a starkly retro 1-bit art-style that channels famed horror manga artist Junji Ito. The bitty, fragmentary nature of it all means it never quite settles into a mood you can lose yourself in, but it’s still deliciously creepy all the same.